


The Night Will Always Win

by unethicalcoffee



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Character Death, F/F, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 11:08:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1145253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unethicalcoffee/pseuds/unethicalcoffee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When someone loves you enough to leave you behind forever, knocking on their door isn't always enough to persuade them against it. AU in which, before her coronation, anxiety grips Elsa tenfold, and is armed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night Will Always Win

Elsa comes to the border of sleep with a knife plastered to a slick palm, her fingers struggling against the tremors of the handle. She brings her opposite wrist to her temple, heaves it across her forehead, cold skin burning against warm, thick with perspiration. At the sight of her own sweat, a breath catches in her throat and thrashes about like a dying fish, her hand flapping in lieu, wiping, wiping it away; her head throbs and the back of her eyes are scorching. She swallows, and her breathlessness births a beast.

_A monster like you…_

Elsa swallows again, grates her teeth – her lip catches somewhere inbetween and a deep, metallic flavour floods her mouth. She swallows – metal, ice, like her.

In the beginning, she once read, a creature of frost and flesh and titanic stature was born from a toxic mist. The creature, perhaps for its ugliness, was butchered by its own children, who fashioned the earth from its flesh, the oceans from its blood, and the heavens from its skull. Elsa, after thirteen years, wonders that such a creature should have fallen so easily – wonders if perhaps it had been the creature’s own intention to die for the warmer world its children would rule. When one is a monster, perhaps…

“Elsa,” a worn voice murmurs through the door. Three knocks, without conviction. Elsa jerks, her shoulder smacking into wood, and listens as Anna shuffles closer to the barrier. She presses her face into her knee, mutes her sobs. “Elsa?”

_You can still save her yet._

And with her leg between her teeth she drives the vorpal blade into her arm.

“What’s going on?”

By the time Anna’s knocks subside, a final chill begins to grasp at her heart, and she watches as her blood-red hands fade from view.

_What a beautiful colour._

 

Anna knocks on her sister’s door every day for five years, every other day for the following five, and every week for the final three. She hasn’t seen Elsa in a lifetime, but now, even the servants have failed to glimpse her. So Anna takes a pillow and a blanket and a book and, with the steely determination of an overgrown child, camps outside of her sister’s door, waiting for something to give.

Elsa never stirs. Not to discuss her coronation, not to go to the bathroom, not to eat; the bitterness that began with their parents’ death wavers in Anna and is overcome by the unsettling notion that Elsa is just across the hall from her, deteriorating. The feeling gnaws, gradually building up to an ache, finally crippling her when all her lidded eyes will show is a little, smiling Elsa who humours her and hugs her and holds her hand, looking more beautiful than Anna thinks it’s possible to be. She has grown frightened of the ease with which Elsa’s rejection wounds her, but how could she forget the way her sister would wrap her in blankets, tales of magic and wonder woven by her lips into low, exciting whispers, and look at her like no one else in the world could matter as much as she?

On the fourth day, Anna abandons all formality and stands once again before the gate that has barred her from her sister for so many lonely years. This time, she doesn’t knock, but braces her entire form and flings her body shoulder-first into the door. It’s painful, sparking the sort of soreness that spreads seconds after one trips and falls, but the door doesn’t budge at first and, worst of all, she doesn’t hear a single sound of protest. Anna channels her erratic heartbeat into the task at hand, ramming into the door again, wood this time splintering against her flesh as the hinges loosen. And despite it all, she can’t help the spark of excitement, a fluttering candle-flame amidst vast darkness, that burns on in her, that makes her giddy with the thought of being loved again. _For the first time in forever…_ She chooses, however unwisely, to nurture this flame, and runs into the door again with her eyes shut.

The moment the hinges give, Anna’s senses fall under siege. Without yet opening her eyes, she falls to her knees and brings her hands to her mouth, partly from fatigue, partly because an overwhelming and unnatural stench awakens her gag reflex. Struggling for clean breath, she gropes around for a memory of the scent and remembers that, after her first and last visit to a butcher’s shop, her attitude towards meat had been irreconcilably marred. This connection pounds at her eyes, which open, glassy with tears.

Her head swims, her heart threatens to burst from her chest. She runs her fingers across the deep red floor, most of the colour refusing to budge, some of it clinging to her fingertips in small clumps of coagulation. The tears break loose from her eyes and she is shaken by sobs, grasping for something in her head, for reason, for help, for silence, finding only despondency. Amidst her convulsions she moves her shoulders and arms beneath the fallen door, keeping her from her sister for the last time, and forces it away.

Elsa’s form is tense even in death. Her fingers are frozen to the blade, her wound splattered in blood and flecked with frost, her lips darker than the winter sky. Anna is wretched, clinging to her sister for the first time in forever, footsteps drawn to her heartbreaking lament. The fact of the icy room does not penetrate her understanding, nor even the fact of her sister’s death. In this moment, Anna recognises only one thing.

She never even said goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to Meterapix for her awesome if depressing comic: http://meterapix.tumblr.com/post/73252110878/headcanonsforelsanna-elsannasexual#notes  
> I am going to write Elsanna fluff I swear just not now [gross sobbing]


End file.
